FINTECH FRIDAYS with Gadgette

‍After Apple shook up the Buy Now, Pay Later market with news that it would now be a competitor to established firms, PayPal is introducing another BNPL product to follow the2020 launch of its “Pay in 4″ installment program. The new offering, PayPal “Pay Monthly” is designed to give customers a more flexible way to pay. Instead of having to pay off purchases over a 6-week period as before, “Pay Monthly” users can break down the total cost into monthly payments over a 6 to 24-month period.

Wirex, a leading crypto payments company, has made their recently launched wallet more accessible to APAC users after releasing a new payment method.

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Cryptocurrencies are a “threat to the safety of our payment schemes,” says Anne Boden, CEO of UK digital bank Starling. Speaking at the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam on Tuesday, Boden said crypto “is very dangerous” as it poses a very huge risk to the existing payments infrastructure.

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Jay-Z and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are teaming up to launch a financial literacy program, titled The Bitcoin Academy, for residents of the Marcy Houses project in Brooklyn, New York, where the rapper grew up. “The simple goal is to provide people with tools to build independence for themselves and then the community around them, ”Jay-Z wrote.

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Mollie is partnering with shipping platform Sendcloud to make managing paid returns effortless for online businesses such as Zara, which recently announced that they will no longer be offering free returns to customers. As 84% of European online shoppers regularly return a product if they are not satisfied, online businesses have been struggling to deal with returns for years.

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Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said that the company will reduce its workforce by 18% — nearly 1,100 people —to “stay healthy during this economic downturn.” The crypto exchange, which went public last year with share prices touching the $350 mark, has lost momentum and is trading at nearly $52 per share with a market cap of under $12billion at the time of writing.

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This ends Your Gadgette FinTech Friday Digest.

Until the next!